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Quick Cocoa (Individual)
2 teaspoons cocoa Few grains salt 1 tablespoon Karo, Red Label Boiling water Top milk or light cream Stir the cocoa, salt and Karo together in a cup, almost fill with boiling water and dilute to taste with top milk or cream.
A single cup of cocoa mixed straight in the cup, from an era when a promotional booklet's job was to put corn syrup into everything. Two details carry it: the syrup does the work of both sweetener and emulsifier, and the water must be at a hard boil.
- Karo Red LabelKaro sold under colour-coded labels; Red Label was the dark syrup, carrying more flavour than the lighter Blue Label. Dark corn syrup is the direct modern equivalent. Plain sugar works but gives a thinner cup; the syrup's body may also help hold the cocoa in suspension.
- Top milkBefore homogenisation, cream rose to the top of the bottle and the first inch poured off was "top milk" — richer than whole milk, lighter than cream. Half-and-half is the closest thing on a modern shelf.
- CocoaThis means unsweetened cocoa powder, and in an American book of this period most likely natural rather than Dutch-process. Dutch-process tastes milder and looks darker; natural cocoa gives the sharper, fruitier flavour.
- The hingeStir the cocoa, salt and syrup to a smooth paste before any water goes in. Cocoa dropped into hot liquid clumps and the lumps never fully break up in a cup being stirred with a spoon.
- Truly boiling waterThe recipe calls for boiling water, which helps the cocoa disperse and lose its raw, dusty edge. Water from a hot tap, or a kettle well off the boil, is more likely to leave a gritty cup.
- QuantitiesTwo teaspoons of cocoa to a cup is a mild drink by current tastes; a tablespoon makes something closer to what most people now expect. The single tablespoon of syrup is moderately sweet and can be cut without harming the texture.
- YieldOne cup, as the title says. It scales directly, but for more than three or four servings it is easier to make the paste in a saucepan and add the boiling water there.
This comes from the kind of booklet that food manufacturers issued in quantity in the early twentieth century: recipes assembled to demonstrate that a single branded product belonged at every meal. Karo, a corn syrup that appeared in the first decade of the century and was sold by the Corn Products Refining Company under colour-coded labels, was promoted hard through recipe pamphlets, and a cocoa sweetened with it is exactly the sort of small, plausible use such books were built on. The recipe also preserves two habits that have since disappeared from home kitchens — the pinch of salt in cocoa, which sharpens the chocolate rather than seasoning it, and "top milk," a measure that only makes sense when milk arrived in glass bottles with the cream standing separate at the neck.